Tech, Science and Art Artist Joseph Hedges | For William Harnett 2

What would happen if an early American Trompe-l’oeil painter time-traveled to a Radioshack in the 1980’s, then to the Dutch Golden Age to paint? This painting is a subtle postmodern mash-up, exploring the links between science and art through the visual language of the experiment. Through scavenging for discarded ambiguous technological and natural objects and rearranging them into new configurations I attempt to re-imbue decommissioned objects with a sense of arcane function and meaning. I attempt to make visible questions regarding the human relationship to technology and the natural world. I imagine the universe as a vast, wondrous, unsolvable puzzle. My compulsion is not to make any attempt at solving but to merely collect, organize, and identify clues.

This piece is an homage to American Trompe-l’oeil painter William Harnett (1848-1892). While I did not quite achieve Harnett’s mastery of illusion, I was able to successfully borrow his compositional style and sensibilities, complete with an object leaning off the table and into the viewer’s space. Unlike Harnett’s works, which featured daily ephemeral of the time such as newspapers, books and cigars, my works feature unrecognizable components of toys or gadgets. My goal here is simply to upset the sense of stability and rootedness that Harnett achieved, and instead demonstrate the unintelligibility of our present era. The use of highly saturated colors (especially orange) help to remind the viewer that this work, while conjuring the dusty timelessness of a classical still life, is in fact of the present time. Like Harnett, with the selection of my objects I attempt to leave a trace of narrative possibility or mystery, without giving the viewer any concrete answers.

I’ve long been interested in abstract painting, but always felt more comfortable with representational imagery. Through painting abstract or unrecognizable objects representationally, I can both render and work on technique, while maintaining the unintelligibility of abstract painting. This painting consists of a gessoed wooden board, several layers of oil paint and finally a brownish glaze, to make the painting appear older and to unify the color pallet.

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